Agile Product Management, Marketing, and More
Posts tagged Product Management
RealClearPolitics
Apr 19th
I have no intention of getting into politics — i just want to point out a site that continues to draw me back for repeat visits. RealClearPolitics is a news aggregator that’s been around since 2000 apparently, but which I discovered in the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election. In today’s hyper-partisan climate, it’s hard to find many sites that simply make it easy to keep up on current events with a balanced perspective.
This RealClearPolitics.com does by focusing on a couple of simple user experience premises: content and simple presentation. For the time that I’ve been visiting the site, the articles selected are chosen from right, left and center-leaning news sources ranging from such selections as Investors’ Business Daily and Weekly Standard on the right to Slate and the New York Times on the left. That alone is worthy of merit. Deeper review might include analysis of the site’s selection of polling numbers, its editorial content, and the percentage of articles from each side. My cursory evaluation of the site’s cross-section of polling numbers showed a wide enough variance to appear solid, and I’m not reading enough of the articles to comment on the site’s own editorials. All I know is that from my marginally-interested-observer perspective, the site gives me what appears to be a balanced cross-section of opinions and facts.
As for presentation, the site is relatively well organized and easy to figure out, and the links are provided in a plain yet readable format (much like the plain text link approach of Reddit.com). The site won’t win any Flash animation awards, but it’s not intended to. What the site aims to provide, it does in a fairly attractive, functional presentation. In a field where success in “web design” typically refers to the latest AJAX or Silverlight components, sometimes what makes a good product is an ordinary-looking site with quality content. Who knew?!
Interesting post about forgetting feature requests
Feb 27th
I ran across a blog post today suggesting that the work of tracking and logging feature requests is unnecessary. As the thought goes, the ideas that keep coming up are the ones worth considering anyway, so those repeated mentions serve to remind the product manager of the market’s needs.
I find this interesting in its minimalism, but within a large software organization it seems like this might be difficult. The product manager is often several levels removed from support calls, which is where a high volume of customer contact is made. The product manager’s site visits, interviews and observations may be only a small percentage of the company’s contact with its customers. So is it wise to trust that the product manager’s selection of contacts is wide enough that those same important ideas will bubble up to the top?
The degree to which a product manager spends time listening to the market also plays a part. If the product manager carries products all the way through commercialization, time in market may be sporadic or limited; in which case, this concept would seem to be more risky of not hearing the “right” messages from the market.
Still, interesting food for thought.
Product Managment should not be overburdened with Project Management
Feb 14th
As a product manager, after delivery of requirements to the development organization, I find myself spending significant amounts of time doing the marketing related tasks I expected to do, but even more time managing the development and QA effort to get the product to market. The role of product management is well known to be responsible for be delivering overviews of the product to the technical writers, trainers and sales people. What it is NOT known to be responsible for is the daily follow-up on defects reported by quality assurance, and the job of maintaining intense focus to “get things done” by the dates promised. I’ve also written about this before. Is this a frequent problem in the industry, or the sign of an immature organization?
Signs suggest this is common:
If the product management surveys are to be believed, most product managers spend very little time doing the things we know that we should be doing, and instead spend all our time managing logistics, and doing detailed work in marketing, development, or sales.
I am responsible for three products of highly varied scope and type. Each product, in order to be great, needs the dedicated attention of a product manager who spends time out in the market discovering the problems customers would pay to solve. I find that merely managing ONE product through the development cycle has severely limited my ability to interact with the market, to the detriment of the other two products for which I function as the market spokesperson. The organization continues to come to me for detailed information about not only high-level milestones but also low-level defects and test pass rates, so while I suspect I need to become better at time management, I also suspect that the organization just doesn’t “get” product management.
Reviewing Steve Johnson’s Pragmatic Marketing e-book on The Strategic Role of Product Management, I am struck by this extract:
For technology companies, particularly those with enterprise or B2B products, the product management job is very technical. This is why we see many product managers reporting to Development or Engineering. However, we’ve seen a shift away from this in recent years, from 19% in 2001 to 12% in 2008. The problem appears to be that technical product managers spend so much time writing requirements that they don’t have time to visit the market to better understand the problems their products are designed to solve. They spend so much time building products that they’re not equipped to help deliver them to the market.
In my organization, it’s not that I spend too much time writing more and more precise requirements–in fact, we avoid use cases so that customer requirements avoid stepping into design. However, our problem is that several high priority products are under the guidance of the same product manager, who cannot manage all of them well.
Does this strike a chord in your experience?
Text = Ambiguous
Jan 27th
Excuse the short post. One of the projects on my plate this week is an internal support system, from which requirements are being elicited from numerous potential users and business stakeholders throughout a number of segments of the company. The requirements that we’ve created are thorough to the point of potentially being unbuildable, because they support a number of ways of doing business that are in place in those various company segments.
The business is challenging the strategy of supporting all the ways of doing business, since stremalining them might lead to a better solution. The video featured here depicts the challenge of numerous stakeholders and business leaders in a realistic way, and thankfully I am able to state that we have delivered workflow diagrams to go along with the plentiful text-based requirements.
One of the things I’m trying to convince my team about is the advantage of delivering multiple types of models to provide several views of the requirements. To me, it makes the requirements more consumable than simple text or text plus one graphical view.
Enjoy!
ProductCamp Austin – Winter 2009
Jan 10th
On Saturday, January 24, 2009 it appears that I will be attending ProductCamp Austin. ProductCamp is part of the BarCamp family of participant-driven conferences, focused on product management and marketing.
Paul Young describes the experience of ProductCamp:
You head to the back wall and read the session names, offered by people just like you. You recognize a friend-of-a-friend’s name who is giving a session about “Connecting with Customers.” That sounds good – you use one post-it note. You see another session about “Agile Product Management.” Your engineering team is moving to Agile so that might be a good session to attend, and use your second note. As you step back to consider your third note, you see a dozen other people doing the same thing, and people feel geniuely torn about what to vote for – there are so many good sessions to choose from! Finally, you put your last sticky on a session called “Career Building in Product Management and Marketing.”
The conference currently cites over 156 participants including representatives from small startups to large technology players such as Dell, Cisco, and AT&T. I look forward to the organic mingling of people in the product management field, to sessions led by people experienced in the field, and of course to the happy hour after it’s over!
Hope to see you there!
Metrics
Dec 29th
I just ran across an interesting presentation on the use of metrics in product management by Dan Olsen, which shines some light on the art of convincing the business side of the organization of the value of a proposed solution. Though the metrics in the presentation are primarily website-related, including click-through rate and rate of registration for a site, the concepts are still applicable to all types of business cases.
Particularly insightful is the idea of graphing the ROI of various benefits in an attempt to illustrate the value proposition (slide 26). Those customer benefits which have the highest importance to the user, but which have the lowest current satisfaction rate, may be the ideal benefits to bring to the table first, or as labeled within the slide deck, “upside potential.”
Have a look!